Sometime later, Buick 04 was somewhere near the Syrian border, just seconds away from weapons release, their F-15 speeding as fast as they could push it. At over 600 miles an hour, time went quickly, especially for someone trying to build a radar picture of an ill-defined target; the tension was building. As Griffith fine-tuned his radar picture, gently moving the crosshairs fractions of an inch, the steering commands in Eberly’s HUD offset ever so slightly, and Eberly smoothly brought his aircraft to the new heading. All of this had been practiced hundreds of times before—except for one never-trained-for factor: Hundreds of people on the ground, equipped with a vast array of weapons, were intent on killing them. They pursued this purpose with passionate intensity.

The F-15E’s warning receiver started to chatter, then displayed the symbols that told both crew members they were being tracked by surface-to-air missile-guidance radars. Griffith tore himself away from his radar and activated the switch that fired an explosive squib on the belly of the jet. This caused thousands of chaff filaments to blossom in the air and—it was hoped—blind and confuse the radar operators on the ground.

Whoosh, whoosh. A pair of guided missiles, probably Vietnam-vintage SA-2s, streaked toward their jet and exploded below and to their left. Putting aside the attack, Griffith dispensed more chaff, and Eberly turned the jet to avoid more missiles. Suddenly there was a flash, and the jet shuddered as if it had struck a wall of water. Surprisingly, they heard no noise.

A microsecond later, a grim but bemused Tom Griffith wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to wait for the EF-111 and F-4G support. A microsecond after that, he moved his right foot to a switch on the cockpit floor that would transmit to the rest of the flight the news that Buick 04 had been hit and would probably abort the attack. But to his sudden amazement, he failed to reach the switch; his feet were lifting off the floor and his ejection seat was traveling up the steel rails that held it in the cockpit. Eberly was ejecting them!

How Eberly accomplished that will probably never be known, for he had suffered a neck wound and lost consciousness. He did not wake up until he was on the ground.

Now Griffith was falling through the night sky, with no sense of up or down, only that he was cold and falling and still in his ejection seat. His mind raced through his emergency training procedures, trying to recall how to free himself from his seat and get his parachute deployed. But then, just as his mind filled with the terrible image of his mangled body in the desert, still attached to the seat, all the magic worked, and at the proper altitude, the tiny explosive charges fired according to schedule and Tom found himself floating beneath his open parachute. Now he knew where the ground was. It was the place where the angry red tracers were coming from, all arcing up toward him. Images of hundreds of bullets striking his parachute flashed across his mind, swiftly followed by the more frightening thoughts of red-hot projectiles ripping into his flesh. Just then, he involuntarily clamped his flight boots together to give some protection to his more precious parts. That lasted until he realized that the explosion of one projectile would remove everything from his navel down, so he might as well be comfortable during the ride to earth.